In a typical data center that provides computing services, such as cloud services, multiple compute devices may be assigned workloads to provide the requested services for a client. Given the latency and bandwidth limitations of twisted-pair copper cabling and the corresponding networking components (e.g., switches) in such data centers, the physical hardware resources, including processors, volatile and non-volatile memory, accelerator devices (e.g., co-processors, field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), digital signal processors (DSPs), application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), etc.), and data storage devices, that may be utilized to perform any given workload are typically included locally in each compute device, rather than being dispersed throughout the data center. As such, depending on the types of workloads assigned (e.g., processor intensive but light on memory use, memory intensive but light on processor use, etc.), a data center may include many unused physical hardware resources and yet be unable to take on additional work without overloading the compute devices.
Furthermore, some typical data centers are designed to operate as a high performance computing (HPC) cluster, using a specialized networking protocol (e.g., Intel OmniPath) to coordinate the communication and processing of workloads, while other data centers are designed to communicate using other communication protocols, such as Ethernet. The networking components in typical data centers are not equipped to manage both HPC network traffic and other types of network traffic, thereby limiting their usefulness to specific workload types.